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The Big Knockover: Selected Stories and Short Novels

Dashiell Hammett

Start date: March 19, 2012

Finish date: March 28, 2012

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Mar 19, 2012 Denise rated it really liked it

Shelves: mystery

I read this as a follow-up to reading The Continental Op, which I enjoyed very much. This volume includes eight more stories featuring the Op, as well as an unfinished novel, Tulip. The Op's stories were great, as I expected. I thought that with some of these stories, Hammett seemed to be playing with other genres, although the hard-boiled style was the same. The Gutting of Couffignal was almost a military story, while Corkscrew was a shoot-'em-up western. I also liked the character in this stor I read this as a follow-up to reading The Continental Op, which I enjoyed very much. This volume includes eight more stories featuring the Op, as well as an unfinished novel, Tulip. The Op's stories were great, as I expected. I thought that with some of these stories, Hammett seemed to be playing with other genres, although the hard-boiled style was the same. The Gutting of Couffignal was almost a military story, while Corkscrew was a shoot-'em-up western. I also liked the character in this story known as "Milk River" (as nameless as the Op himself), and the relationship between him and the Op, which I thought was unusual. The Op normally doesn't get too involved with anyone else, but I think he came to feel a real friendship for Milk River. I think that Hammett must have had fun writing the title story, The Big Knockover, because it was so big that he got to make up literally dozens of colorful names for the crooks!

The unfinished novel, Tulip, was interesting, and I feel a bit ambivalent about it. The story involves a first-person narrator, very autobiographical, and a visitor named Tulip. These two men play a game of words with each other, which is often difficult to understand. Hammett also injects other stories into the narrative: the narrator relates, in his own words, a story that Tulip tells him about something that happened to him (or maybe didn't), later he reads aloud an old newspaper article that he wrote years earlier, that Tulip has saved - a very esoteric review of a book about the Rosicrucians by the mystic Waite (the man behind the Rider-Waite Tarot, I believe), and later still, the narrator relates a long account of what happened to him in several hospitals following the first World War, when he had TB. Although Hammett never finished the novel, he did write a few concluding paragraphs, in which,, months later, he has shown Tulip a manuscript that he has written (the preceding narrative, perhaps?), and Tulip tells him he didn't get the point. I'm not sure I did, either.

The book also includes an interesting and touching introduction by Lillian Hellman, Hammett's long-time lover. ...more

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Oct 31, 2009 Heather (DeathByBook) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Jul 24, 2011 Vikas Datta added it · review of another edition

Dec 06, 2012 Karen K. Miller marked it as to-purchase · review of another edition

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Apr 14, 2014 Penelope marked it as d-o · review of another edition

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